Asking the court to believe he allowed something that valuable to be lost to negligence or chance events like a disk failure
Disk failures usually aren't. What fails is not the stored information, but the motor on the arm in the HDD, which leaves the data trivially recoverable by any number of companies with labs equipped to do the job using their own arm to recover the data from the drive.
And yep, I agree with you on the defence being to transfer some BTC in that original block.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
